Archive for the ‘Wordsmith Wednesdays’ Category

Last week was the 52nd Wordsmith Wednesday, marking a full year of my vocabulary-themed posts. In light of that, they will be undergoing a change. This week’s Wordsmith Wednesday (right before this post) was the first under a more flexible posting order.

In the past, there was no guarantee that I would encounter a word I didn’t know every single week. And so I found myself on several occasions having to search for a word expressly for the weekly post. Although not really a problem, I found it somewhat less satisfying than posting a word I had genuinely run into in the course of my regular reading.

What I’ve decided to do is keep Wordsmith Wednesdays going, but rather than sticking to a strict, once-a-week schedule, I will be posting only words that I encounter naturally. This means that there may be consecutive weeks where no words get posted. However, when I do add new words to the list, it will still happen on Wednesdays, to keep with the theme.

As always, I’ll be keeping the list solidly up to date on the Wordsmith Wednesdays section of my blog.

1. Acoustics, Phonetics . the characteristic quality of a sound, independent of pitch and loudness, from which its source or manner of production can be inferred. Timbre depends on the relative strengths of the components of different frequencies, which are determined by resonance.

2. Music . the characteristic quality of sound produced by a particular instrument or voice; tone color.

Wordsmith Wednesdays made-up example sentence:

A conductor must have a refined ear in order to pay attention to a multitude of timbres at one time.

View this word on Dictionary.com for pronunciation and additional definitions.